Yesterday the planets finally aligned so Diego and I were able to get the latest Vampire the Masquerade Rivals expansion Shadows and Shrouds to the table.

I was so glad we were able to do this. I have plans to build my first Rivals deck around Hecata and their torpor shenanigans.

But before I do that I really needed to play the precon deck as it comes in the expansion. Get an idea of how the clan plays, what sort of tricks they have up their sleeve.

Remember these two games were two player. So where the deck might be “weak” in a head to head game, it might be stronger when played in a three or four player game.

I went with Annika as my leader in the first game. If my memory doesn’t fail me the advice for new players playing the core precon decks is to use the six cost blood potency vampire as the leader. So that’s the advice I went with for my first play of the Hecata deck.

Now I will state for the record I had no idea what cards were in the library deck. I was playing blind!

All I knew going into these games was the Hecata deck made use of the new wraith mechanic. More on that later. Plus you wanted vampires in torpor.

Looking at Annika’s ability I was assuming there were going to be a few rituals in the deck.

However during our first game I spent more than an action or two drawing cards, or playing action cards such as Grave Robbing to draw cards hoping to get a ritual. I didn’t draw a single one.

An inspection of the deck revealed it had five ritual cards out of the forty that make up the library.

With two other vampires (Nathaniel and Bianca Giovanni) interacting with rituals in some way. You start to get the impression that having rituals out is an important part of the deck. Although there are a couple of action cards that do things with rituals that seem token gestures to that plan.

So I would expect to be hitting rituals a bit more reliably than I was. Especially when one of them (Summon Spirit) is one of the very few ways for a player to make wraiths in the deck.

I didn’t make any wraiths in this game. Although I did use the leader ability to burn the odd mortal in the street.

I lost the game due to having no more vampires left in my coterie. I’d spent too much time looking for rituals and making sure I had vampires in torpor. Leaving myself open to having pretty weak vampires left in my coterie that could be easily taken out.

For our second I changed my leader to Zahara.

I still didn’t hit a ritual until late in the game.

Although I did get Zahara cycling through torpor nicely to generate wraiths. The Haven Eternal Life Mortuary’s Leader Ability was really handy for doing this. A nice little synergy.

Diego won with an agenda points victory.

In all the Hecata precon has three strategies it uses. Although thematic, I think it could have been more focused on say just two of them.

Having vampires in torpor with the torpor ability is cool. Getting extra value from them during the torpor/mend step is nice. At the moment it’s just a matter of building decks around the current torpor abilities. So I see decks that splash the odd Hecata vampire to supplement their main strategy.

Wraiths are an interesting addition. I’d like more ways to create them. But having a combo of cards that burn mortals, do something based on number of burned mortals, and create wraiths, the amount of initial cards is probably about right. Plus I like how this mechanic now makes burning a mortal by another player a harder decision for that player. They may need to heal badly, but do they really want to fuel these cards?

I’d also like to see more wraith abilities. At the moment they boost the stats of the vampire they are attached to. I’d like to see some that punish the attacking player. But the surprise element is cool.

To be fair to the deck with the number of action cards for combat I don’t think I was aggressive enough with the deck. I did like the reaction cards like Flesh of Marble that increase the defense of the vampire and change aggregated damage to physical damage.

I need to look at the other cards available but I think we might be seeing the start of a “blue” control style deck in Rivals. Spirit’s Touch interacting with another players library, or Clairvoyance looking at their hand. Mental Block looks fun and stops a player playing a card from their deck. All “blue” type things to do to another player. And I have been known to play blue type decks in the past.

Overall a fun deck, just not overly suitable for the two player head to head format.